It was great finally having a full week of school! I can confidently say your children were as excited as I was to be back last week because they have been working extra hard in the classroom with little redirection from me to stay focused. I even had one friend say how fun math is getting because it seems easier to do 🙂 I know I sound like a broken record but make sure you keep helping your child with their math facts and keep up with them on their reading each night. To make math facts more fun try giving them a PEMDAS equation (explained below) or giving them a 1-digit by 2-digit multiplication equation which works on their multiplication and addition! Also with reading, find a good book you can enjoy with them each night before bed. It will be a special time for both of you but it will also boost their vocabulary, understanding, and connections to other books/life.

In knight time we read the story The Albertosaurus Mystery. In it we learned that we can learn a lot about the past by studying fossils from long ago. Ask your child about what they learned about the albertosaurus and why they were a special species of meat-eating dinosaur. We also completed a mystery science on why scientists believe dinosaurs looked like lizards. Ask your child if they can remember the three reasons for why we now believe dinosaurs looked like lizards. It is pretty fascinating! For grammar, we worked on creating and identifying adjectives using stuffed animals and sentences and comparing nouns by adding er/est. In writing we are working on writing opinions. This week we reviewed how to write a basic opinion about our favorite things. Next week we will begin writing opinions that deal with a problem and solution and how to present our idea with evidence that will persuade our reader.

In math we have been working on multiplying 2-digit by 1 digit numbers. We have also started learning about the order of operations, or PEMDAS. PEMDAS stands for Please excuse my dear aunt Sally and it is used to help us figure out what to do in a problem when there are multiple operations in it. Ask your child what each stands for. They may forget the e for exponents because we don’t honestly need to know that one yet. However, you can test your child on the rest. They find it really fun to figure them out 🙂 Some examples would be 24-(3×2) or 8+7×6. Additionally, we started working on understanding numbers in the 10,000s by identifying them, writing their word form, and comparing them. They’ve been doing great with this because we’ve been including this in our review most days.

In religion we reviewed the parts of Mass – the Liturgy of the Word and Liturgy of the Eucharist – and connected what happens with each by talking about our experiences with it when we’ve led Mass ourselves. We also reviewed important parts of communion like the Breaking of the Bread to remind us of the Last Supper with Jesus and how we come up to get communion. We also completed our lessons on protecting God’s Children by talking about safe people in our lives that we can trust to protect us, safe and unsafe touches, and how to say no whenever we feel uncomfortable from another person’s touch. We also discussed internet safety and how to never put up personal information about ourselves online or give personal information away to people that may seem like friends. We also talked about what to do when something inappropriate pops up on our screen or if a friend tells us to look at something that we know we shouldn’t. You can discuss these things further at home with your child reiterating what is safe and unsafe in each of these areas.

As always have a great week and if you have any questions or concerns let me know,